Bog Standard Isekai

Hogg motioned for Brin to follow, and then casually stepped off the roof to fall five stories to the garden courtyard below. Brin only hesitated a half-second before following. He couldn't drop that far without serious injury or death; even without his Vitality curse it was too far. But he trusted Hogg.

The first second of the drop was spent in abject terror as he wondered if maybe he should've thought this through, but then he felt something pressing against his feet--a platform of hard light. It gradually took on more of his weight, and when he hit the ground it was hardly more jarring than a somewhat quick elevator.

Brin also noticed the sound magic that Hogg cast when they hit the ground. He couldn't sense sound magic with the same precision as light, but from what he could tell Hogg was freezing the ground in place. Not only was he preventing sounds, he was stopping the subtle vibrations in the floor that a particularly sensitive person might be able to feel.

Hogg stepped over to a stone bench and sat down. Brin sat next to him, glad that the invisibility was masking the trembling in his legs. The fall hadn't been painful, but it had caused a spike in his adrenaline. That was great for ignoring pain or pushing through exhaustion, but it could make him a bit clumsy in a delicate spy operation like this, so he was glad for the chance to calm down.

"This is probably the safest place to talk. The wind and the trees will help disperse any of the things that a Life or Wind [Mage] would use to track us. Not that we'll have to worry about either one unless we leave some clue that we were here," said Hogg.

Even though he communicated in Silent Voice and they were both invisible, Brin couldn't help but feel oddly exposed. The garden wasn't empty. Vitor had left, but servants and others crossed through here and there, and he saw several people lounging on the balconies above. But magical spying operated on another set of rules, and the feeling would help him to not get comfortable and make mistakes.

"How in the world does a seventeen-year-old get to level 45? That's absurd," said Brin. Hogg was invisible, but Brin didn't need to see him to know the face Hogg was making at that assertion. "You know what I mean."

"When he went in, he was level 30. A good level for someone of his age and status, but nothing extraordinary. He came out at level 45. As for what happened to him in the meantime, your guess is as good as mine," said Hogg.

"No it's not! With your high-level [Inspect] you probably know what he had for breakfast this morning," said Brin.

"Nothing. I think he's dieting to make his muscles pop out more for the first day of school," said Hogg.

Brin laughed. "Forty-five is high, though, right? I know what I had to do to get my levels, and it was more than enough crazy for three lifetimes. If I show up to the first day and half of my peers are level 40 by virtue of having lots of money, I think I'll cry."

Hogg snorted. "Level forty-five is worryingly high for someone his age. It's not something that should happen in a sane world. He'll be the highest leveled person in your class by far..." Hogg didn't need to see Brin's confused expression. "...because you'll be hiding your real level. Remember? I think we could get away with 38 or 39. It's hard to get past level 30 with just study and practice, though all the young magelings will have spent that last year running around the country hunting undead, so lots of them will have a few more levels than they did last year. Expect to see a fair number of 35s, and many of them will have Skill levels that are at or above yours."

Brin nodded, thinking. "That doesn't sound too bad."

"Good. Have you found his room yet?" asked Hogg.

Brin nodded again, and then remembered he was invisible. "Yes. He went straight there. It's empty now."

"Let's go," said Hogg.

Brin led the way this time, letting his split mind chart a course where he wouldn't run into anyone. The main hallways were wide enough that they could walk past someone without brushing their clothes, but the main hallways didn't go everywhere very easily, and they had to take the servants' hallways for a stretch. Hogg didn't complain or make any sarcastic remarks when Brin had them backtrack to avoid a servant who went in a direction Brin didn't expect, and they arrived at Vitor's room with little trouble.

He grabbed the doorknob and twisted. Locked.

Hogg summoned a thread of hard light and pushed it inside, and the door clicked open a moment later. "Still think gloves are annoying? You wouldn't have thought twice about leaving your finger oils on that doorknob," said Hogg.

Brin rubbed his hands unconsciously, then stopped when he noticed what he was doing. Hogg had always worn gloves pretty much all the time, and maybe there was something to that.

Inside, the room was very tidy. Either Vitor was an extremely fastidious person, or he didn't mind servants cleaning up after him.

The one thing that would remind Brin of a teenager's room in his old world was a poster on the wall. It advertised an [Illusionist] movie about Sir Elatore of Argonis. He also had a broken scepter, a footlong length of white metal with a cracked diamond on the top, displayed like a trophy. [Wyrdic Inspect] called it [Wand of Blooming Fountain (broken)], and he could sense that any enchantments upon it were now useless.

"Use your Lightmind to take pictures of everything, and help me look for books or notes. Cobol has information on the blacksite locked down tight, but Vitor was there. I'm working under the assumption that after he got out, he demanded some answers about what they were trying to do there, and that Barros and Cobol would've had no reason not to give him those answers," said Hogg.

There wasn't much to check. There was a bed, a nightstand with a picture of a woman on it, probably his mother, a wardrobe, and a single locked chest. If Vitor had weapons or armor, he stored them somewhere else.

Hogg looked under the bed, which Brin had already seen with Invisible Eyes was empty, and then went to the chest. He held his fingers near the lock, moving them around without touching it like he was trying to figure out if it was hot without touching it. “This might take me a second.”

To look busy, Brin turned his attention back to the poster. Could it be covering something? He reached to peel an edge away, and Hogg said, "Did I ever teach you the X-ray spell?”

He hadn’t, but it was one of the ones listed in his Lightmind. Brin scrolled down in the menu, selected it, and then let the Lightmind draw on his Mana to cast the spell.

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The result was an abrupt and confusing mess of feelings and images that he couldn’t completely comprehend, but he understood enough to tell that there wasn’t anything behind the poster. He’d have to practice with that some more.

Hogg finally tried his hard light on the chest, and it opened. The inside were clearly a few personal items. Knick-knacks, a few hats, a hand-mirror, and the like. The hand-mirror was broken, on closer inspection. It shouldn’t have been broken; that was really nice glass. Dropping it on stone wouldn’t be enough. Come to think of it, a lot of things in the chest were in a bad state. Clothes were torn, a hairbrush had a broken handle… maybe Vitor was having a hard time adjusting after suddenly gaining a lot of Strength.

Brin didn’t really want to see what Vitor kept in a locked chest near his bed–this kind of personal information would make it more difficult to pretend he’d never been here, but he took a mental image of everything he saw just in case it might be related to the Motley Shroud.

There was only one book.

“It was too much to hope that Vitor kept a diary. This might be something, though,” said Hogg, handing it over to Brin.

An Analysis on Chromatic Expansion of Aquatic Aspects. That wasn’t exactly bedside reading, not unless he’d completely misjudged Vitor’s personality. Which he may well have, it’s not like he’d seen the guy for more than a couple minutes.

“Memorize every page and then we’ll put it back," said Hogg.

Brin put the book on the floor, since a flat surface would make it easier to flip through quickly without bending the pages too much. He started to go through it, letting [Memories in Glass] store this in a bead of glass that he'd use for nothing else so that it would be easy to retrieve.

"Let me," said Hogg.

He flipped the pages five times faster than Brin had been able to, and somehow made sure each page still had a moment where it was lying completely flat and straight. It was only a forty page manual, and Brin didn't distract himself by trying to read the words, he just recorded it for later, so they were done in less than a minute. Hogg placed the book back in the chest, did something with his hard light to lock it again, and then Brin charted a course for them to get out of there.

The trip out was much the same as the trip in, with Brin casting invisibility and Hogg forming a ladder for them to climb out on. The second climb up the ladder made his muscles burn to an embarrassing degree, and he had to force himself not to breathe heavily when they reached the top.

They dropped down again right onto the street, walked back into an alley to drop their invisibility and recover their disguises, and then after walking a quarter mile away from the house, Hogg let them drop even those.

They walked onward, away from the busy central city and towards the Tower. The houses immediately became nicer and more ornate. They were still multi-story townhomes, but now there were gardens and parks in front of the homes and little waist-high fences to discourage traffic from the street from drawing too near. Then the townhomes ended at a large walled estate. Brin could only see over the walls with his Invisible Eyes, but it was a massive compound in a gothic style that reeked of wealth and menace. Most interesting were the fountains. They were ubiquitous, of every shape and size, and Brin even found one where the water flowed up into the air from pipes on the ground to pool in a basin on top of a balcony patio.

The entire place was heavily enchanted. He could feel it in the Wyrd, how much the magic of this place objected to his remote magical viewing. The physical structure was mirrored by an even more impressive series of magical structures and defences.

It was impressive and beautiful, and most of all, dangerous. The city house of the Barros family now looked almost carefree and innocent by comparison.

Hogg didn't need to explain. This had to be house Cobol. For the life of him, Brin couldn’t imagine how Hogg meant to sneak into this place.

This wasn't a part of town with any blind alleys or convenient hiding spots, so Hogg led them to a spot where a couple of neighboring trees shielded them from view of the mansion's walls.

Bedelia was already there, in a servant's black and white, and she was completely soaking wet. That was just Hogg showing off--making her clothes cling the way that real fabric would when wet was a fairly impressive bit of work. She'd been sniffing softly, but stopped when she heard them approach.

"Young Master Mistaken! How nice to see you again," she greeted in a trembling voice. Strangely, her face and hands were colorful. Why had Hogg given her color? Wasn't the whole point of the Shadow Constructs to help him pretend that he was a [Shadow Mage] who couldn't do anything with color? She was also sort of smeary looking, somehow.

"You too, Bedelia. But why are you soaking wet?" asked Brin, because even though Hogg definitely already knew, he definitely wanted Brin to ask.

"They said... they said they were going to set me on fire!" said Bedelia. Hogg handed her a tissue, and she wiped her face. Oh, it had been makeup. Hogg had sent her to spy on the Cobol household, and had her put makeup on to disguise her monochromatic skin, so that even if she got caught she'd just be reinforcing a pretend weakness. That was such a Hogg thing to do.

And then she'd done such a bad job pretending to be a regular maid that they'd tried to set her on fire. That was a very Bedelia thing to have happened.

"Did they actually say they were going to set you on fire? What did they say exactly?" asked Hogg.

"They said 'You're fired'! Exactly like that," said Bedelia. She finished wiping her face and was now all shades of gray again. She looked up at them with real distress. Her eyes were a bit darkened and swollen and her cheeks were flushed gray as if she'd been crying.

Brin's heart thumped in his chest and he looked away. Bedelia was really pretty. Of course, Hogg had designed her from the toes up like a video game model, and it's not like Brin had never seen her before. She looked exactly like last time they'd met but... Sancta Solia, he'd spent too long in a monastery and he had no defense against girls now.

He laughed a bit too loudly to try and cover his sudden embarrassment and said, "Bedelia, that just means that they've terminated your employment. They weren't going to burn you."

"Oh!" she said with a self-deprecating grin. "My mistake. But how can they terminate my employment? I don't work for them."

"I told her to just walk in wearing the uniform and start cleaning stuff. No one ever questions it. Oldest trick in the book," said Hogg.

"Oh. A trick. I know all about those!" said Bedelia slyly, but in a way that made it clear that she really didn't.

Brin had to look away again. He wasn't the type to blush, but he was on the verge of one.

Hogg noticed him glance to the side. "Yep. I see them, too. Get ready."

"What?"

A shield of black hard light appeared just in time to stop a thrown knife from hitting Brin's eye.

Bedelia leapt away, and waves of shadowy hard light grew from the ground, forming a shifting bubble around them pushing spike tendrils in all directions.

Then past that, three figures. They moved quickly, like shadows themselves, and Brin only managed to [Inspect] one of them. An [Assassin].

They were under attack. What did he have? Just those nice glass bullets he'd stored in Lumina's ring. He pulled them out and looked for a shot. Was he ready for this? When he'd told Hogg he'd be as good as he ever was he’d been telling the truth, but this had all happened really fast.

Bedelia caught an [Assassin] and pounded him into the ground with a skull-cracking punch and Brin took the shot, firing his bullets.

They flew fast and true, pelting the [Assassin]. Most bounced off his leather suit, but at least one or two drew blood. Then the man disappeared.

Suddenly, everything was still. Hogg's hard light and even Bedelia froze in place, to the extent that Brin thought they'd caught some sort of spell or poison, but no, they were keeping still to try and see or hear their [Assassins]. Nothing moved. It was over.

Hogg sighed. "Well, shoot. I think that's it. We shouldn't press."

"...ok," said Bedelia, looking confused. She stopped pressing a wound in her arm, letting it drip black blood freely. Hogg had let any wounds she might have taken appear on her clothes and body, so now in addition to clinging to her skin, her clothes were artfully torn in key areas. Was Hogg screwing with him right now?

"I'd hoped to snoop in the Cobol house a little, but not if they have warning. I think our night is over," said Hogg.

"Sunrise is six hours from now," said Bedelia.

Hogg sniffed a half-laugh, and Brin chuckled way too much. He really needed to get this under control.

"Let's go home."